Camera trapping in ecology: A new section for wildlife research

small- scale auteco-logical studies and large- scale syntheses. This journal's philosophy is to help authors have their work read and used by the scientific community— we believe this Section will help with that goal. Ecology and Evolution 's first volume featured its first camera-trapping study (Fisher et al., 2011), a paper desk- rejected from several other journals as being “interesting but improbable” among other traditional fare. The Editorial team gave it a chance, and over 100 citations later, it continues to stimulate scientific debate (Stuber & Fontaine, 2019 ). Since then, we have published 100 s of camera-trap studies. We are eagerly anticipating many more camera- trap papers in this dedicated Section, as Ecology and Evolution plans to be at the forefront of the great proliferation of camera- trapping research, and continue to serve as a platform for scientific thought and debate.

camera traps; networking observations from these citizen scientists have yielded great insights and will continue to do so (McShea et al., 2016). Camera traps are being employed by Indigenous peoples to ask questions about wildlife on their traditional territories (Artelle et al., 2021;Fisher et al., 2021), an important step towards meeting the principles of the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Gilbert, 2007).
Software has advanced in-step with the hardware. Converting images to numerical data is made easier with custom software, much of it open-source (Greenberg et al., 2019;Young et al., 2018).
Processes for automatic identification are being developed to greatly speed up image classification and process "big data" (Duggan et al., 2021;Shepley et al., 2021). Conceptual advances, such as frameworks for understanding how camera detections sample un- Tremendous discoveries lay in the future. Networking arrays of camera traps across different landscapes-even globally, similar to weather networks )-will allow macroecological research on a scale never before possible (Chen et al., 2022;Magle et al., 2021;Rich et al., 2017). Notwithstanding, great insights await in small focal studies too-these lay the foundations of ecological inference. We support these endeavors in Ecology & Evolution's new section Camera Trapping in Ecology. The journal's mandate to be author-friendly, without gatekeeping assessments of importance as a barrier, makes us a place that welcomes both small-scale autecological studies and large-scale syntheses. This journal's philosophy is to help authors have their work read and used by the scientific community-we believe this Section will help with that goal.
Ecology and Evolution's first volume featured its first cameratrapping study (Fisher et al., 2011), a paper desk-rejected from several other journals as being "interesting but improbable" among other traditional fare. The Editorial team gave it a chance, and over 100 citations later, it continues to stimulate scientific debate (Stuber & Fontaine, 2019). Since then, we have published 100 s of cameratrap studies. We are eagerly anticipating many more camera-trap papers in this dedicated Section, as Ecology and Evolution plans to be at the forefront of the great proliferation of camera-trapping research, and continue to serve as a platform for scientific thought and debate.

K E Y WO R DS
camera traps, wildlife ecology